Das Gespräch wurde auf Englisch geführt.
Carolin Weidner: When I think about your film, I always have that melody in my mind. You know that little synthy melody? But the whole film has quite a musicality and a lot of rhythm to it. Sometimes like a personal song, but also a polyphony. I wondered how you work with the music, but also how you did the editing around it, because I think it’s like a piece of music as well.
Pepa Lubojacki: I always imagined it as really musical from the beginning. Sometimes it feels like it’s maybe too much disco, but I actually like it because it’s just keeping it alive for me. I described the characters, what emotions I have about them. Then I described the story, what emotions I have about the story. The composer Adam Matej prepared music based on this moodboard and I worked with it in the film based on my intuition. It worked really well because he just captured the emotional core of the story in a way that perfectly completed the musical concept of this project for me. The edditing flows with the music and I used this musical repetitiveness because that’s also a topic in the film.
Barbara Wurm: What is so important about the repetitiveness?
PL: For me, it mirrors the intergenerational trauma a lot – the repetitiveness. Because I think that we just give the next generation some things over and over again. In my family, it’s very visible that there is this issue, or the tendency, towards addiction. It’s not just my generation, it goes very far back, from what I was researching. That is repetitiveness. Until someone is willing to break the cycle, it can go on forever. And I don’t think it’s just with addiction. It’s with many things like emotional unavailability. So we just repeat old patterns until someone realises it and decides to break them. And unfortunately, that someone usually is a black sheep in the family. That’s the worst part – if you’re the cycle breaker.
CW: What you said about the repetitiveness – did you realise it during the project, or was it always there and you just had to find a form for it?
PL: I think that I always knew, but I didn’t have the terms for it. I felt it in my heart, but I didn’t have the proper knowledge to understand what’s going on, because you see it even as a child. You can see and hear the stories. But it all became much clearer to me during the making of this film because I was not only recording it, but I also spent five years doing pretty deep research about the psychology of addiction, and the neuroscience behind addiction. I really wanted to understand my brother because what was probably the most difficult thing for me was how angry I was with him. I was also angry with my dad for doing certain stuff, but I always loved him so much. I loved my brother so much, and I was, again, mad at him, and it was really clashing. I decided that I would understand what’s actually going on. And once a person understands certain topics, it’s much easier to stop being mad. I was not surprised by any of his behaviour anymore.
For me, it’s a really fragile lens, and I just wanted to make it as morally sound as possible. My brother had veto power – if he saw anything in the film he didn’t like, it wouldn’t go in.
CW: But this was also a process over these five years, right? I feel like we see you grow into this mindset – it wasn’t there from the start.
PL: Not at all. I think that the film really reflects my journey. At the beginning, I was much more angry, and at the end, I was actually angry at myself for being angry. But it was a crazy process. I changed so much during this film. And I must say that I have never had a better relationship with my brother than I have now. We tell each other we love each other all the time, which we didn’t do before. We talk about stuff which we didn’t before, and I actually think that it improved our relationship a lot because I don’t judge him anymore. Shame is a big thing. I think that he can feel less shameful around me, which gives him much more freedom to be who he is, not just the addict, because that’s the painful part. When you are this addicted and also unhoused, that’s very often the only thing people see about you – that you are just this homeless person. I don’t even like the word homeless. I use ‘unhoused’, but that’s how people see you: a homeless person who is just drunk. And that’s painful.
CW: How did you talk to your brother about him being a part of your film? How did he respond?
PL: At the beginning, we tried filming with a cinematographer, a sound person, and everything, but it didn’t work well. It was just a joke for him – he wasn’t really being himself. I came up with the idea of using the iPhone and from then on it worked because it was always just the two of us. What you see is him, because he totally stopped noticing the phone. I actually stopped noticing it myself, which was strange, because at some point I started recording things that, later, when I saw them, felt so unethical. But you don’t think about it – if you’ve been doing it for five years and something happens, you just reach for the phone and start recording. The ethics of the film were my biggest priority from the beginning, because I was really scared. I thought about it a lot. I’m making a film about addicted people, and when they give consent, they say, ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea.’ But when is consent truly valid? How sober must someone be to give real consent? Legally, of course, we were clear, because they signed the paper – but that’s not what I mean. I mean real consent. You see the phone, so you know you’re being recorded – but if you’ve been addicted for, I don’t know, 20 years, and you haven’t slept properly for 10 years, because no one sleeps properly on the street, you’re sleep-deprived, and you probably have a lot of mental health issues. I have many worries about documentaries in general, and especially about consent. For me, it’s a really fragile lens, and I just wanted to make it as morally sound as possible. My brother had veto power – if he saw anything in the film he didn’t like, it wouldn’t go in.
BW: How often did you show it to him?
PL: That’s funny. He actually saw it for the first time on Christmas Day last year because he couldn’t before. I tried repeatedly, but he didn’t manage. He always managed a little bit, and then he just, I don’t know, left or tried talking about something completely different. It was not easy for him. Also, it was not easy to catch him sober, and I wanted him to see it sober.
BW: Did having the camera also help you say things that you wouldn't say without the camera?
PL: Actually, no. At the beginning, I was probably more focused on opening up some topics. But eventually, I saw my brother so often that I recorded over 200 hours of footage. It just became so automatic that it was actually very difficult to stop doing it. I also have hundreds of hours of recordings of our phone calls and other things. I seriously think that I went down some rabbit hole. The editing process was horrifying.
BW: How do you go through 200 hours of visuals?
PL: I was pretty much swallowed by a very dark place. I really think that it became a maniacal thing. An unhealthy thing.
CW: I also had the impression you were around a lot of stuff in general. But at the same time, it’s obvious that you have another life as well. How did you manage to go back and forth?
PL: I didn’t very much. It didn’t have a very nice effect on my personal life. I think it’s partly because at the beginning, I thought that I would really change something with this film because I became so desperate about what was going on. My cousin losing his legs because he was refused seven times at the hospital. Actually, it happens all the time. Just before this interview, I got a call from my cousin Marco. He has blood poisoning, and he was also refused by the hospital. It is a big issue that hospitals do not want to take unhoused addicted people. I was just becoming so sick of it that I thought that I had to manage to… I don’t know…make the world nicer to people like them. It became a big aim. I think that I stopped prioritizing everything else. That’s why it became this not very healthy obsession. I couldn’t switch between my personal life and making the film. So I was pretty down for a big portion of those years.
I wanted to find a balance between the heavy material and some playfulness in the storytelling.
CW: You have a very playful, artistic approach to working with your material – how you engage with words, typos, and AI technology. Did all this also help you deal with the emotional load?
PL: Yeah, I think this helped me because I had one and a half years in the editing room, so it was a lot of time to process it and find the way I wanted to tell the story. I wouldn’t have been able to edit it in this way when I was in the middle of shooting, but I definitely gained some distance, and I always knew that I didn’t want this film to be depressive. I mean, it’s probably not very cheerful, but I was looking for a way to make it a little bit playful, also for the reason that I think that with, for example, the talking pigeon and things like that – if they were set in a plain voiceover – they can sometimes sound a little bit embarrassing or even pathetic if it’s something serious. I just wanted to find a balance between the heavy material and some playfulness in the storytelling.
BW: What about the translation into English or the transfer into English language of the AI photographs?
PL: They had to be in English because the program I was using didn’t support the Czech language, so I just left them in English. And for Czech distribution, we will be using another program.
BW: What was the program you were using?
PL: It was Runway.
BW: You have a lot of experience with it?
PL: No, not at all. I actually hadn’t even edited anything before. I learned everything DIY at home, like from YouTube tutorials on AI or editing with Premiere.
BW: Why did you go for the AI?
PL: Because I didn’t want to use voiceover. And it was interesting, because when I started using the AI, it was pretty new and not that good. On purpose, I used the not-so-good material. I didn’t want to replace it with something better. But I got that idea from the page MyHeritage. It’s a page that makes family trees. For many, many years, they’ve had this very easy tool where you upload a photograph and it moves a little bit. I uploaded a photo of my father there, and it made me cry because I don’t have any footage of him from before he died, and I made him move. It was an intense moment for me. I actually realised that it could be a good tool for storytelling. On purpose, I also used different voices because I wanted to clash with the idea that it’s really us. I wanted to point out that it’s obviously not us. Besides this, I’m not the biggest fan of AI, and I hope that it will not be the main part of the film that people notice, because I see it more as a tool to give space to us as children and my dad to tell the story, rather than as a tool in itself. Also, for example, my dad says things he would never say in real life. That’s why I do it on purpose. We are much more clever than we are in reality. I’m playing with this – the knowledge we didn’t have as people, but we are a walking encyclopaedia in the film.
BW: I guess that is part of your research.
PL: Yeah, it is. We are telling the research-based stuff.
BW: But this probably helped you have both a subjective and an objective understanding of what’s going on, right?
PL: It helped me big time, definitely. I think it was also healing to see us tell certain things. It has some potential. I even, just for myself, tried to export my dad telling me some stuff in his AI version, which I had always wanted to hear from him. It did something to me.
CW: How is it for you now to present such a personal work publicly? You’re quite visible in the film as well.
PL: I'm horribly scared. I'm really, really, very scared. I’ve been preparing myself for it for a long time. I go to therapy also to prepare myself. But I don’t think there was any other way, because honestly, if I were only showing my brother and my cousins, I would feel bad about it – then I would just be a hidden filmmaker showing people’s miserable lives. That wouldn’t be fair. I knew I had to be part of the story. It’s not easy, but also, you know what? The thing is, I grew up with so much shame. I would seriously try to cover up these parts of my life in front of my friends. It took me so much energy. I don’t think I had anything to be ashamed of. I think it’s really important to talk about these things.
BW: Coming back to the repetitiveness, the music, the exchange with the pigeon, and all those elements – how often did you change the film’s overall structure? How many versions were there before, and why did you end up with this one?
PL: Actually, there’s just one. I’ve never changed it. I made it like this the first time. It was very long, and I was just shortening it. But it was always like this. First it was fifteen hours, then six, then three. From three hours on, people started to help me. Then I showed it to my dramaturgy team. I have this thing where I cannot share my work until I feel I’ve put everything I need in there. I’m really solitary. I’m not very good at cooperating with people, because unless I’m sure that the meaning I want to put in is there, I cannot share it – which is probably very stressful for my producers, because they had no idea what was going on and just had to trust me.
The way they’re pushed aside makes it so difficult to come back. The idea that ‘you only have to want it’ doesn’t work – my brother tried so many times.
CW: What kept you working on the project when there were moments of despair? What was the main force that made you go into it over and over and over again?
PL: It was to help my brother. Nothing else. At first, I really thought I could, I was that naive. I thought that if I read enough books and understood enough, I would be able to save my brother. Because I still have a lot of regrets about not saving my dad. Obviously, people like him suffer because the narrative around unhoused and addicted people is really bad. It’s not helpful. The way they’re pushed aside makes it so difficult to come back. The idea that ‘you only have to want it’ doesn’t work – my brother tried so many times. The waiting time for rehab is almost a year with the good ones. Most people on the street have a lot of debt. If you go to work, the state takes almost everything. What’s left isn’t even enough for rent. It’s actually as good as impossible to get off the street. And also, again, the repetitiveness – people assume that those on the street are just lazy. And so we don’t think about it. We just accept it and then spread it and it becomes this big fluff of interpretations, when each personal story is actually individual. And obviously, the connection with trauma is becoming pretty well known. A lot of people have mental health problems. Even if they don’t at the beginning, they do after a few years on the street, because it’s so rough.
CW: Could you tell us a bit about the scenes where you are the main character, like the highly aesthetic shots of you running through the woods? Or when you start to reconstruct your father’s house – this other ‘Pepa layer’.
PL: The highly stylised elements were supposed to be there from the beginning because I wanted to create this little world of our memory. We both have a very strong, meaningful memory: How we rode our bikes, fell, and totally smashed our faces. It was horrible. I was crying. It was really painful. But I was so happy because I experienced it with my brother. I wasn’t alone in the pain. I felt so connected to him, because he was seriously my hero when I was growing up. He was just so cool. Whenever I ask him about our childhood, he remembers this memory too – it’s important for him as well. I wanted to preserve it in this little dark, watery space. It was always meant to be this dreamy underwater place where the memory stays conserved forever, and no one can take it from us. Otherwise, we were always separate. I experienced things very differently than he did. He started to numb himself, while I always faced it. I think that’s part of why we ended up a little differently: He ran away from things while I just… It’s not in my nature to run. I didn’t actually want the house part. That came from people telling me they wanted to see my ‘normal’ life apart from my relatives. My life was basically defined by them. I like that I’m this character you don’t really know much about – you only know me through them. But everyone said they wanted a little glimpse of me. They liked the idea of me fixing the house on my own, because it’s also a house my dad built. He died, and I started fixing it. I tried to use it as my own little story arc, because having a home was always a big deal for me. Having my own home means safety. Now I don’t need to be scared of being unhoused. Well, unless something happens, then I could be – but for me, having a home is magical. You feel it in your bones, this buzzing. I feel like I’m in a castle here. I still hug my house sometimes. I’m so happy to have running water, a nice wooden floor, So this journey of getting my own home, which my dad built, became a nice way of placing myself in the story.
CW: This is actually how we decided to end our film synopsis: Home, I’m coming.
BW: Maybe this is also a good moment to close the interview, since it’s a beautiful double ending in your home, where you already are.
PL: Yeah, that’s true.
